Speech prepared for delivery at Driving Change for the Planet – ChangeNOW Summit, convened by the INSEAD Hoffmann Global Institute for Business and Society
Humanity is an astonishing species. We have made incredible and rapid advances. In human health. In transport. In energy, food production and infrastructure. Even this event is a marvel. Despite the pandemic forcing us apart, we can communicate effectively and instantly across huge distances. We have made all of these advances over the last few hundred years – a period that, in evolutionary terms, is but a blink of the eye.
But in our haste to adopt new technologies that made our lives better, we did not think about the long-term consequences. Now we are paying the price. Our high-carbon and resource-intensive economic models are warming the planet. They are destroying nature and biodiversity – undermining the foundations of our existence and contributing to the emergence of COVID-19. They are polluting the air, land and sea. They are increasing inequality, as those with least access to the benefits of human development are the ones who suffer the most from its unwelcome side effects.
Today, I want to talk about what we can do to change. What we can each do to transform our societies so that they operate in harmony with nature. First, though, we need to understand the depth of the three planetary crises that have placed us in so much peril.
The first crisis is climate change.
Concentrations of all greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are higher than at any time in the past 800,000 years. We can all see the consequences. Growing storms, summer heatwaves, forest fires, droughts and locust plagues.
And we are approaching tipping points. Warming oceans are melting ice, which means less reflected sunlight and more heating. Permafrost is disappearing, releasing methane into the atmosphere. Burning forests deprive us of carbon sinks. We face a system cascade that will send global temperatures through the roof.
The second crisis is nature and biodiversity loss.
When I was young, I would play in the woods with my brother. I remember the air thick with insects and melodic birdsong. It was so vibrant and loud. Now if you are out in nature, what do you hear? Perhaps silence. A 2019 study looking at North America found there are three billion fewer birds than 50 years ago. And what do you see? Not so many bugs, including some of the pollinators that over three quarters of food crops rely on.
This is all down to us. Humanity has altered 75 per cent of land and 66 per cent of marine environments. An estimated 4.3 million hectares of humid tropical primary forest, the size of Denmark, are lost each year – mainly due to agriculture, livestock and infrastructure expansion.
As we degrade our ecosystems, we chip away at the foundations of what makes well-being possible – food, water, temperature regulation, economic growth, the roofs over our heads and the clothes we wear. This loss is a threat to our very own survival.
The third crisis is pollution and waste.
Most of us have breathed in dirty air, which causes millions of premature deaths each year. Marine plastic pollution has increased tenfold since 1980, swirling in ocean currents and in the guts of fish and seabirds. We throw away 50 million tonnes of e-waste every year – roughly equal to the weight of all commercial airliners ever made. The pandemic is worsening the waste problem, with tens of millions of disposable protective equipment thrown away every day.
The core driver of these crises is unsustainable consumption and production.
Since 1970, trade has grown tenfold, the global economy has grown nearly fivefold, extraction of natural resources and energy has tripled, and the world population has doubled. Throughout this growth, we have expected the planet to keep on giving, no matter how badly we treated it. We grew reliant on fossil fuels. Rushed to convert land for agriculture, infrastructure and urban expansion. Emptied the waters of fish in exchange for plastic and toxic sludge. The end result is the three planetary crises we are facing.
Friends,
As UNEP’s “Making Peace with Nature” report laid out earlier this year, we need urgent transformations in three areas to address these crises. We must tackle the Earth’s environmental emergencies and human well-being as one indivisible challenge. We must transform our economic and financial systems to power the shift to sustainability. We must transform our food, water and energy systems to meet growing human needs in an equitable, resilient and environmentally friendly manner.
Friends, this year, governments have many ways to kick-start these transformations. There is a huge opportunity in the trillions of dollars being put into pandemic recovery. These funds should be turned towards clean and efficient energy, restoring nature’s services and promoting economic models that keep resources circulating within economies rather than heading to the rubbish dump.
In major events such as the climate and biodiversity summits, governments also have a chance to increase their commitments. They can promise stronger reductions to emissions and more support for developing nations. They can put in place ambitious and meaningful targets to protect and restore nature and biodiversity – including through the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, which is about to get underway. They can and must immediately start turning decades of promises into action.
But here’s the thing. We cannot leave it all up to governments. We need whole-of-society action for a whole-of-society problem. We all need to take responsibility, in every aspect of our work and professional lives. Look, humans excel at inventing new ways to be and live. But we also excel at compartmentalizing. We might drive our hybrid vehicle to work at a fossil fuel company. We might work in fast fashion but then fret about microplastics in the ocean. We might work for a company that is complicit in the destruction of nature but go home in the evening and tell the kids to turn off the taps and lights, as if that is enough.
We can’t keep doing this.
I know it is hard. We have so much to worry about, and so little time. It can be difficult to make sustainable choices in a system that doesn’t encourage them. It can be difficult to refuse a good paycheque on moral grounds when you need to put food on the table.
But we all have to try. We need to challenge ourselves to live a more holistic life by following green guiding principles in our work and personal lives.
First, let’s look at what this means for the business owners tuning in today.
Let me send a clear message to business: sustainability is in your own best interests. The World Economic Forum has clearly stated that climate change and nature loss are massive risks to profitability. The financial implications for businesses and investors include reduced commodity yields, disrupted supply chains and the loss of potential new products.
Also, growing numbers of consumers are making choices based on how a business operates, rather than what it sells. For example, The Economist last year highlighted that 87 per cent of young investors believe corporate success should be measured by more than financial performance. No business that wants to stay afloat long can afford to keep backing the status quo.
So, how do you go about transforming your operations?
The first step is to start accounting for the value of nature in all operations. UNEP can already estimate the value of natural capital – the planet’s stock of renewable and non-renewable natural resources. We are encouraging governments to use this alongside
produced and human capital to give a true, inclusive measure of growth. The same applies to businesses. If your business is making money in the short-term, but damaging the planet in the long-term, you need to reflect this in your balance sheet.
The next step is to set science-based targets for nature, climate and pollution. This means adopting a time-bound plan to make operations climate net-zero. This means taking a no net-loss of biodiversity approach in your operations. This means adopting circular models into design and manufacture, and to have end of product life. This means ending the toxic trail of pollution your operations through implementing clear and time-bound steps.
The third step is to hold suppliers and trading partners to the same standards. We are talking about being comprehensive and holistic. Your business’s internal operations can be squeaky clean, but if it is outsourcing environmental damage, you are still part of the problem.
All of this applies just as strongly to investors, banks and insurers – because we need all investments to back sustainability. We can no longer afford to have ethical finance on the fringes.
In our work at UNEP, we are seeing ever-stronger commitments on this front. We have 229 banks, covering 45 per cent of the global banking industry, signed up to the UN Principles for Responsible Banking, aligning their businesses to society’s biggest challenges. For instance, a group of 44 of them have formed a Net-Zero Banking Alliance, planning to fully decarbonize their loan books.
A longer-standing group of investors we established in 2019, called the Net-Zero Asset Owners Alliance, is issuing 2025 portfolio emissions reduction targets in the 19 to 29 per cent range. These investors realize that they cannot decarbonize themselves unless the underlying industries they support also head in this direction.
Crucially, these process and commitments, to be credible, need to be fully transparent, third party assessed and grounded in science. Why? To avoid greenwashing. Greenwashing is a cynical attempt to gain the financial benefits of a sustainable profile without doing any of the work. It directly harms our efforts to build a better. It has to stop.
The Principles for Responsible Banking are addressing this by establishing a Civil Society Advisory Body to guide signatories on difficult environmental or social challenges and requiring that bank reporting on principles implementation be third-party assessed to ensure credible compliance. Meanwhile the Net Zero Asset Owners Alliance has established a Scientific Advisory Body to guide them in designing sectoral emissions pathways.
Second, let’s look at what this means for the students of INSEAD preparing to enter the workplace.
Look, previous generations have left you with a legacy of environmental devastation, and a system that you must help to change. It is unfair, but you – as the next generation of leaders – can and must be the changemakers. I am not going to list sustainable career choices. You can figure that out for yourselves. Equally, you can easily go and work for the businesses that are doing all of the things I outlined above. This is a valid choice. But if you want to make a real difference, you can become a changemaker within the broken system.
Preaching to the converted isn’t going to make the difference we need in our societies. So, we need brave and fearless people inside corporates. We need strong and young voices, not worn down or subsumed by a company’s culture, to be the flea in the ear, the conscience, the voice of reason that forces corporates to move beyond lip service to sustainability and start doing something meaningful.
Another option, one that is just as valuable, is to start your own green business. If the old companies won’t change, you can displace them. You can take advantage of the growing demand for green and sustainable products, services and companies. You, with your start-ups.
And we are in desperate need of new ideas and innovations that can provide solutions to our planetary woes. Every year, UNEP’s Young Champions of the Earth award identifies young entrepreneurs who came up with ground-breaking ideas and provides them with seed funding. You could be one of them.
Third, let’s look at personal responsibility, which is relevant for all of us.
As I said earlier, we can no longer afford to compartmentalize. Even if we green our business operations, take on the system from within or come up with something revolutionary, we have to carry the fight over into our personal lives. We all need to choose greener forms of transport. Look at our diets, be it cutting back on meat or buying seasonally and locally. Cut our food waste. Move away from fast fashion to clothes that last. Buy second-hand, repair, reuse, recycle. Choose green energy providers when available. As with institutional investors, put our money to work through ethical finance.
There are so many options to reduce our individual impact – and these are the kinds of choices that also drive business to change their models. It won’t always be easy, particularly on a budget. But we have to do what we can, when we can. And we must always remember that we have a vote. Sustainability is not a left or right issue: it is a long-term survival issue, an intergenerational justice and equity issues. We need to get on the right side of history, and vote for the leaders who will do the right thing by the planet, and so by us. We must not back those who would close off borders and look after narrow national interests alone. There are no more narrow interests. The environmental threats we face are all encompassing. A cloud of toxic air pollution will not stop at a checkpoint and hand over its papers. We are learning that if one person has COVID-19, we all have COVID-19. The same goes for climate change and environmental and planetary destruction.
Friends,
I know it seems like I am asking a lot. Well, I am. But I would not be asking if there were any other way. There is no single, quick fix to the three planetary crises. Technology can only take us so far. No nation, or company, or investor or individual can do it alone.
But if each of us does our part, in all aspects of our lives, we can retain and extend all the benefits of human ingenuity in way that puts us back in harmony with nature. We can all find a way to live together on a planet of peace, prosperity and equality. We can all be changemakers.
Thank you.
Executive Director
